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Just in time for Valentine’s Day: Poor sleep can affect your love life

Looking for another way to communicate the importance of getting good sleep to your shiftworkers? How about sharing this Valentine's appropriate message with your crew?:

Getting poor sleep and being fatigued can make you take your spouse for granted and negatively impact your love life.

That’s a message that might hit home for your shiftworkers. This research was presented January 19 at the Society for Personality and Social Psychologists and revealed that an alarming side effect of sleep loss is the effect it has on our personal relationships, especially on our relationships with our partners.

Dr. Amie Gordon, a psychologist from the University of California, Berkeley, studied over 60 couples from ages 18 to 56. The couples were asked to self-report their sleep patterns, how well they slept and how sleep affected their appreciation of their partner.

In another experiment, the couples were all given a series of tasks and asked to complete them together. Gordon’s study showed that those who reported sleeping poorly were also less appreciative of their partner’s work.

Gordon’s study shows how sleepless nights (or days!) can leave us emotionally closed off, and less attuned to the needs of our partners. Poor sleep can leave a romantic partner feeling unappreciated, leading to resentment.

The best way to combat this? According to Gordon, it’s about ingraining the habit in yourself to consistently let your partner know how much you appreciate them – even when you’re tired and grumpy.